Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/914

 904 Reviews of Books Southerner of to-day, he candidly admits that in practice the system contained features that were good. Exhaustive and expansive crops like tobacco and cotton, as well as the land and labor systems which developed with them and of which they were in part the cause, were of importance in producing the static and non-self-sustaining condition of Southern agriculture prior to i860, and the author remembers (p. 169) that slave labor was negro labor and that at least one charge against the form of labor organization, that it was uneconomic, is not wholly sustained by " the experience of the last forty years ". In a brief but suggestive chapter on the free negro a conclusion is reached that his criminality both in the North and in the South was " far above " his numerical proportion, and that though sub- jected to discriminations and a "fearful potentiality of punishment" the well-behaved and industrious free negroes were " probably little dis- turbed ". The strongest part of the book is the latter half, in which, through the description and analysis of the argument in slavery polemics and apologetics, the mental attitude of the disputants is made clear. New light is thrown on the history of anti-slavery sentiment and organization prior to 1829, and the relative importance and success of the Garrisonian and non-Garrisonian abolitionists in attaining the great end by their widely different methods and aims is so well stated as to materially modify the traditional view of the typical abolitionist which is current at the South. The radical Garrison, reputed head of the moral move- ment, was not necessary to its ultimate success, rather it was conserva- tives of New England, the Middle States, and the West that furnished the practical brains and sinews of war and turned what might have remained a mere moral crusade and philosophic propaganda, important though this was. into poutical anti-slavery, effective as an organic process in current events rather than as philosophic propaganda. The theory of impelling the South by " moral suasion " or the force of organized outside opinion to self-action was impracticable and as little understood perhaps at the South as the real conditions of slavery were understood at the contemporary North : but abolitionists, though be- yond the Underground Railroad accomplishing little to mitigate or limit slavery, convinced the North that slavery " was not only harmful to the South but contrary to their own interests ", and in laying hold of the positive principle of free discussion as opposed to the southern plea for silence and laisscs fairc they had an immense advantage in the con- troversy. Aside from a sometimes too literal following of authorities where opinion rather than fact is stated. Professor Hart has given us the best general description and study of the social and moral aspects of the American slavery controversy that has yet appeared. J. C. Ballagh.